Biofilms are biological films which are produced as specific bacteria are proliferated on specific surfaces through processes of adsorption, growth, and desorption. Traditionally, techniques for measuring the biofilms are as follows.
Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is a technique of measuring absorbance, light emission, or fluorescence by selectively reacting only cells in a specific state, using an antibody having high singularity and high sensitivity and an enzyme serving as a signal generating source.
Photospectrometry is a technique in which bacteria that become the source of a biofilm are dyed with a specific kind of reagent, and the dyed sample is dissolved with a solvent such as alcohol, so that the concentration of the reagent used in the dyeing of the bacteria is detected by measuring an absorbance at a specific wavelength.
In the above-described methods, high-priced exclusive equipments such as an ELISA reader and a photospectrometer are used, and therefore, a large amount of cost and a complicated system are required. Also, in these methods, cells should always be marked with an additional material such as a specific dye reagent or enzyme, and hence a separate reagent is necessarily required. Therefore, the methods are not suitable for real-time monitoring in which the formation of a biofilm can be continuously monitored.
Korean Patent Publication No. 10-2005-0007540 discloses a method for automatically measuring the formation of a microorganism biofilm by using a confocal imaging system and a method for measuring effects of the revelation of microorganism genes in a test chemical and the formation of a biofilm.
However, in Korean Patent Publication No. 10-2005-0007540, a separate reagent is necessarily required to measure a formation state of the biofilm, and therefore, the method is not suitable for real-time monitoring in which the formation of the biofilm can be continuously monitored.
Accordingly, studies on a real-time monitoring device and an analysis method of a biofilm are required, which are more simple and inexpensive, require no separate reagent, and do not destroy samples.